Madeleine Thien - Do Not Say We Have Nothing

When he tapped lightly on the frame of the window, Swirl came to the door and opened it. She stared at him as if at an apparition.

Wen the Dreamer recited the famous line of Li Bai: “See the waters of the Yellow River leap down from Heaven, roll away to the sea, never to turn again.”

“Destined,” Swirl answered, “to return in a swirl of dust.”

Big Mother, who was standing behind Swirl at the door, came out. Calmly, as if he came by every evening, she embraced him. And then she wrapped herself in a sweater and left them alone. She walked for a long time along the nearby ridge. Lamps from the oil refinery illuminated a web of nighttime workers. The sky was dark purple, filled with foreboding. When Big Mother returned, she saw her sister and Wen standing side by side in the shadows of the house. The stars were dimming and she had the sense that the night sky was loosening from the earth and lifting away. Not once did Big Mother see them bend or move, let alone touch one another. After having been separated for a decade, they stood so lightly, as if the ground itself could not be trusted. Maybe they talked about how, in a house like Ba Lute’s, in the home of a Party hero, their daughter might have a chance to thrive. Maybe they spoke not of Zhuli, but of something else entirely, of other intimacies and unwritten lives. It was for the wind to hear, Big Mother later told Sparrow, and not for the likes of her.

Wen the Dreamer and Swirl left in the night, in a bid to escape to the borderlands. Mongolia could be reached in two days, and Wen had contacts who could help them on the other side.

The following morning, Big Mother began a letter to Zhuli, her good eye right up to the page. She would find a way to send it, along with letters from Swirl and Wen, once she felt it was safe to do so. My heart has been heavy all day long , she thought, remembering the poem she had recited at her sister’s wedding. Your elder sister has looked out for you. And now you are both crying and cannot part, Yet it is right that you should go on ….

In the letter to Zhuli, she wrote, “I watched them depart on one small horse. Can you imagine? As if they were young again.” Her tears wrinkled the page. She folded the letter and hid the words away. That evening, she went to the local Party secretary and told them her sister had slipped and fallen into the Wei River. She had tried to save Swirl, but the current had been too strong, the fetid water, polluted with waste from the factories, had carried her away. The Party secretary convened a search team. After five days, with no sign of the body and anxious about rising production quotas and the new political campaign, he pronounced Swirl dead, signed her papers and closed her file.

—

In Shanghai, Sparrow was taken away by Red Guards and for a week they had no word of him. A different group came for Zhuli on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then left her alone until Sunday. Sunday was the worst and the Red Guards came again on Monday. On Tuesday, Sparrow came home, starving and exhausted, but unharmed. He’d been held in isolation in a storage room and then let go. It was inexplicable. On the streets, loudspeakers blared from every corner. The official news program announced that Lao She, whose plays Wen the Dreamer had loved, and who had once been celebrated as “the People’s artist,” had drowned himself. To celebrate his death, joyful marching music danced from the speakers. In the middle of the broadcast, Red Guards entered the house. Despite Sparrow’s begging, despite his grip on Zhuli, they took her. Her hand slipped out of his. In truth, the fear in Sparrow’s voice had so terrified her, Zhuli had closed her eyes and pulled her hand free.

At first, Zhuli’s classmates had been inventive. They had new slogans and methods, they had new implements like garbage pails, conductor’s batons and razors. There was a comedic quality to it all, one laugh crashing down onto the next, explosive laughter, barbed laughter, tripwire laughter, questions that were not questions, the confessions they wanted that had nothing to do with confession.

On and on they sang:

The water of socialism nourished me, I grew up beneath the Red Flag

I took the oath,

To dare to think, to speak up, to act,

To devote myself to revolution.

They loved to sing. It was the way they looked at her, the utter implacability, the contempt, she couldn’t bear. The revolutionaries soon lost interest in their own implements, and now they beat her with their bare hands. Kai said that she had always cared more about music and her desires than about the Party. He said he had tried to instruct her on the correct works, even going so far as to copy them out by hand for her, but she had rejected them. Her parents were enemies of the People and Zhuli refused to denounce them. She was loose and had no morals, she was degenerate. All passions should be subsumed to revolution, he said. He talked and talked and would not stop, but he never mentioned Sparrow’s name and never betrayed him. When he ran out of words, he left and did not come back. After this, she felt she understood everything. Music began with the act of composition but she herself was only an instrument, a glass to hold the water. If she answered the accusations or defended herself, she would no longer be able to hear the world that was finally seeping into her. Loud, strange music. She kept turning her head to try to place this second orchestra, this outer room, and meanwhile the revolutionary youth kept trying to make her face forward and look at the floor. She saw their hands shouting and their mouths smiling. Silently, she berated herself. Animals, she thought, do not weep. Instead they never look away.

That day, Sparrow brought her home. He couldn’t stop weeping and she realized she’d never seen him fall apart and it frightened her. But he was safe, she thought. The Red Guards had not harmed him. She thought that Kai was protecting him. Always, the pianist was just behind Sparrow, watchful, but perhaps it was all in her mind. Still, some link between the three of them could never be broken, it was the future that was to have been, if only the country had chosen a different path. She wanted to ask Kai so many questions. She wanted to tell him that whatever happened, whatever they chose, one day they would have to come awake, everyone would have to stand up and confront themselves and realize that it wasn’t the Party that made them do it. One day, they would be alone with their actions. She wanted to tell him, “Don’t let them hurt your hands. Your gifted hands.” She wanted to tell Sparrow, “No matter what happens, you must finish your symphony. Please don’t let it disappear.” Did it matter more to love or to have been loved? If anyone answered her question, she didn’t catch the words. I am so far away now, Zhuli thought, that words dissolve before they reach me.

How far is that, she thought. She felt terribly alone. How much farther?

—

With Da Shan and Flying Bear away in Zhejiang, the laneway house was quiet. On Thursday, she woke very early as she used to do. The inky darkness of the night protected her as she put on her favourite blue dress, pinned the rough edges of her hair aside, gathered what she needed and slipped through the front door. The gods of silence protected her and neither Sparrow nor her uncle woke; or if they did wake, they chose not to stop her from leaving. The night was a dream, a pure warmth that settled on her and seemed to ease her awake. She could barely walk and yet nothing hurt. She took side streets and alleyways to the Conservatory and the journey lasted a long time. Small fires burned. She came to an intersection that was piled high with books. They looked as if they had been overturned from a truck, they made a shape like a sand dune. Here and there were groups of students sleeping outside. One woke and watched her passing but seemed to think Zhuli was part of her dream; the Red Guard gazed at her and did nothing. There were posters everywhere, a mute shouting that surrounded Zhuli but no longer frightened her. She did not know how or why, but now that she understood, now that she had come to a decision, the old fears had drained away. Asleep, the revolutionaries appeared innocent, they seemed as nothing. Zhuli walked and saw buildings, littered streets, damaged lights, scraps of clothing, broken furniture. She felt the hardness of the pavement, the blue-black air and even the weightlessness of her dress. No matter which way she turned, the roads twisted and led her to the Conservatory, this had always been the course of her life. Past the gate, the courtyard was alive with shapes, small and large piles of trash which she moved between as if they were a row of empty seats. The Conservatory door had been propped open with a shoe, she did not know why, but she left the shoe in place, nudged the door wider and went inside. She thought she saw abandoned programs, lost handbags, forgotten coats and then, after a moment, the hallucination passed and she came to the staircase she had first climbed when she was a child, when Sparrow, holding her hand, had brought her to study with Professor Tan.